Hessian high-performance computer

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The Hessian high-performance computer ( HHLR ) is part of the high-performance computer network of the state of Hesse . The first generation of high-performance computing was the Power Cluster from 2002 to 2012 . The current generation is Lichtenberg II .

background

The most powerful computers in the world are used by the USA, China and Japan. At the European level, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe Initiative (PRACE) was founded, in which Germany is one of five main partners among a total of 17 countries. This initiative aims to create a Europe-wide infrastructure for high-performance computing. High-performance computers of the highest performance class should be located on this level.

At the national level, the Gauss Center for Supercomputing (GCS) is a merger of the three federal data centers in Jülich, Garching and Stuttgart. The GCS represents the German interests in the PRACE initiatives.

The Gauss Alliance (GA) is the amalgamation of all supercomputer centers at state level. The Hessian interests in the Gauss Alliance are represented by the TU Darmstadt as a voting member and the Goethe University in Frankfurt as an associated member. The TU Darmstadt operated the HHLR.

tasks

The main task of the system was to make resources available for problems whose requirements exceed the local possibilities of an institute or an individual university.

The HHLR was specially designed for applications with high parallelism and high communication requirements. But applications with particularly high main memory requirements also had their place here.

Power cluster

Historically, the first generation was synonymous with the Hessian high-performance computer (HHLR).

The computer

The computer was installed in 2002. It could be used by scientists from all Hessian universities as well as the Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research GSI . It is financed by the participating universities and the state of Hesse.

It was operated by the University Computing Center (HRZ) of the TU Darmstadt on behalf of the HHLR advisory board and the competence group for scientific high-performance computing in the Computational Engineering (CE) research center.

The computer was part of the Hessian high-performance computer network. Together with the Linux PC cluster set up by the Center for Scientific Computing CSC at the University of Frankfurt for less closely coupled tasks (low communication requirements), it is one of the two pillars of the Hessian high-performance computer concept.

properties

The system consisted of 19 SMP nodes with a total of 580 processors. The 18 computing nodes each had 32 Power6 CPUs and at least 128 GB of RAM. As a shared memory computer (SMP), the machines were particularly suitable for parallel problems with very high communication requirements. In order to be able to effectively process programs that require more than one SMP node, the computers were connected to one another via a fast internal network (8 lanes DDR InfiniBand ).

Successor systems

The successor system has been the Lichtenberg high-performance computer since 2012, the performance of which exceeded that of the HHLR by a factor of 30 when it was introduced in the first expansion stage.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ High-performance computing in Hesse, Hessian Ministry of Science, accessed on February 15, 2016
  2. ↑ Old clusters. In: hhlr.tu-darmstadt.de. Accessed July 30, 2020 (overview).
  3. ↑ a b Website of the Ministry of Science of the State of Hesse, accessed on February 15, 2016
  4. ↑ www.online.uni-marburg.de, accessed on February 15, 2016